Articles by Raphael Caixeta

Recently I took a week long trip down south to Sunny Isles Beach to visit some friends and bake in the sun for a while. While there I ran into some car trouble so I had to get a rental car for a few days, the guys at this local car rental hooked me up with a great deal so props to them. Just had to get that plug out of the way before I forgot. Now on with the story! It would have been hard to miss the craft beer talk about town lately. Between the local success of Funky Buddha and the news that Sunny Isles Beach is being considered as the new location for the their new brewery, it does seem as if the area is making steady strides in playing catch up to popular beer locales. But is Sunny Isles Beach really an underrated beer city? Call me slightly jaded, but as a traveler who has covered many US cities, it seems every where has become a “foodie” and “beer” destination seemingly overnight. There also seems to be miles of tourist “trails” to go along with them. But I’ll back up a little: As far as tourist destinations go, I’ll be the first to admit that craft beer and Sunny Isles Beach seem to be an ideal match. The Sunny Isles Beach craft beer scene has indeed been growing and shows no signs of slowing down. In this case I’m all for tapping that local keg. (Although I don’t think I’ll be consuming anywhere near the 48 ounce per day limit – and does craft beer even come out of kegs? How do they get it into the cans and bottles? I guess I need to go visit Funky Buddha Brewery to find out how it’s all done for sure.) If you want to support the growth of the local craft beer industry in a way other than just drinking it, be sure to follow this page started by a group of local beer enthusiasts who are trying to encourage Stone Brewing Company to make Sunny…

I use these apps on an almost daily basis, and I’m sure my iOS experience wouldn’t be the same without them. What are your favorite iOS apps? Social Facebook This one is an obvious one to have. Even though it’s always crashing, it’s a lot better than going to their mobile version. And it has push notifications. Tweetbot The official Twitter app doesn’t look as awesome and doesn’t support CloudApp; and since it has push notifications support now, I love it even more. AIM I’m always on AIM, and even though there are alternatives to the official app, I’ve never quite got used to the other ones. Fitness Fast Food Calories I like knowing how many calories I’m about to eat, and with FastFood, I have access to the menu of several restaurants along with their food’s calorie counting. Weighbot Nothing motivates me to lose more weight than knowing how close I am to my goal. Weightbot allows me to track my weight every day so I know how far I’ve come and how much more I have to go. Dayta When I’m not tracking my weight, I’m probably tracking my runs and other misc. fitness related data. Dayta allows me to track everything with ease and provides awesome analytics and graphs to see how far I’ve come. It’s even got a web app now that syncs your data for you. Work Wallet I have tons of stuff to remember on a daily basis; Wallet allows me to be able to forget some of those things. It’s also available on the Mac and syncs with MobileMe. Things I’ve been using this as my task manager for a long time. Even though they don’t have cloud syncing *yet*, I’ve gotten so used to it that using anything else is just a hassle. Quicklytics Integrates with my Google Analytics account and gives me detailed reports on the go. Universal with iPad support. Skype Video chats, calls and regular chats. Awesome to stay connected with oversea employees. Going Out Tipulator Gorgeous way of calculating tips. WhereTo? Find new places nearby to go eat, etc. Be Put…

At the end of 2014 I had just undergone my first real surgery (gallbladder removal) and I used to weight around 182 pounds by the time I left the hospital. I don’t know what happened in the next few months, but by the time I really started looking to realize I gained weight, I was at 205 and in denial. Andy and Craig mentioned several times just how much weight I had gained. I let it keep going for a little while longer and then one day, out of absolutely nowhere, I just started running. I don’t know if you have ever decided to just “try” and go out running, but it’s by far one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life. To see just how little you can do in the beginning is disappointing and downright embarrassing. The pace you go, how heavy you feel and just the amount of noise you make trying to gasp for more air is terrible. The hot and humid South Florida weather didn’t help either. I could have let all of that stop me and just give up. I, however, did the exact opposite. I didn’t care how much I ran, as long as I went out and did it. In the first few weeks I used to run nothing but a quarter mile. After being able to run more than half a mile in a row, I amped it up and just ran 1 whole mile. I waited until I was able to run a mile in under 12 minutes until I amped it up and started running 2 miles. Over the weeks I started seeing some really great progress and I made a promise to myself that I would be able to run 5 miles a day by the end of the year. And I did it. January 30th, 2015 I completed my 500th mile. My Nike+ log is actually very awesome to look at. In those few months I lost a little over 40 pounds (I’m at around 163 right now) and have started my next fitness goal –…

Usually when you hear a good idea, the first thing you do is think of necessary features in order for that idea to work. You probably jot down (or think) of all the things you want this project to do and have. Most of the time, you’ll over feature the project. It’s ok; we’ve all done it. Up until recently, when new ideas were thrown at me, I would write down everything I wanted the project to do and would spend hours and hours building it. Most of these projects ended up nowhere. As it turns out, when you add too many features, your to do list becomes bigger and bigger. When your to do list gets too big, you tend to get unmotivated and end up never finishing. Even if you do finish, you won’t be 100% satisfied with your end product. Had I been smart back then, I could’ve used my time for better things. It turns out that all I had to do was think in simpler, more realistic terms. The first thing you have to realize is that your product is probably not going to make it. That’s depressing to hear and you probably hate me now, but let’s just think for a minute. If you spend all of your time working on these unnecessary features now, you’ll never know if your actual base concept works. Why not try it out first? Finding out whether or not people are interested in your core product should be your #1 priority. To see what you really need, just ask yourself “What do I need to have in order to see if this idea will take off?”. Look at it realistically – don’t dream of things. When you’re realistic about your idea, you’ll find your set of core features a lot faster. When you have something out there that people are using and that you’re getting feedback on, you’ll know what you need to add. It’s always best to add things to your project when you know what people are actually using it for. Look at Twitter for example;…

It’s interesting to know just how often you’re sitting on your computer wishing that you could easily send whatever you’re looking at to your mobile device. Last year I was working on a project called Blurbii, which was a Mac, iOS and Web app that gave users the ability to do nothing more than drag and drop resources to the menu bar, and instantly receive a push notification to their iOS device with the content they sent. It never launched. Monetizing would be a nightmare. It’s such a niche product, etc. Today though, I’m releasing Blurbii for Mac. You still drag and drop pieces of text to the menu bar icon. Instead of receiving a push notification though, you get a QR code that you scan on your mobile phone. It’s awesome because you don’t need an iPhone (even Blackberry has a QR scanner). I’ll be improving Blurbii a bit more through the next couple of weeks. My goal is to get file sharing in there. QR Scanner will be updated to handle Blurbii displays and shy away from just being a QR scanner. There are hundreds of scanners on the App Store. I want mine to be different. If Blurbii interests you as a project, follow me on Twitter: @raphaelcaixeta. I’d love to hear your feedback! Download Blurbii, v1